Subjective versus Objective Moral Wrongness

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter A. Graham
Keyword(s):  
Moral Wrongness

Price gouging and the duty of easy rescue

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Brake
Keyword(s):  
Legal Enforcement ◽  
Price Gouging ◽  
Special Case ◽  
Moral Wrongness

Abstract What, if anything, is wrong with price gouging? Its defenders argue that it increases supply of scarce necessities; critics argue that it is exploitative, inequitable and vicious. In this paper, I argue for its moral wrongness and legal prohibition, without relying on charges of exploitation, inequity or poor character. What is fundamentally wrong with price gouging is that it violates a duty of easy rescue. While legal enforcement of such duties is controversial, a special case can be made for their legal enforcement in this context. This account distinguishes, morally, price gouging by corporations from that of individual entrepreneurs.

scholarly journals Compromise: What Makes it Bad?

2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nigel Biggar
Keyword(s):  
Basic Principle ◽  
Moral Evil ◽  
Moral Sense ◽  
Moral Rule ◽  
Dirty Hands ◽  
Judicial Process ◽  
Principle Of Justice ◽  
Moral Wrongness

This article considers what makes a compromise bad. First, it defines a compromise as a decision involving a loss of good (i.e., an evil), which should therefore be accompanied by ‘agent-regret’. Regret, however, is not moral guilt. Pace proponents of ‘dirty hands’, a morally right compromise cannot retain elements of moral wrongness (as distinct from non-moral evil). Second, the article proceeds to elaborate the features of bad compromise further in terms of common moral sense: the preference of less rather than more of a single good; the preference of an inferior to a superior good; and the violation of an absolute moral rule. Third, it extends its elaboration in terms of three historical cases: the abandonment of strategic promotion of a good; tactical suspension for insufficient reasons; complicity in indubitable and certain injustice to avoid tolerable costs; and the violation of a basic principle of justice as distinct from normal judicial process. Finally, it adds a methodological epilogue, in which it reflects on whether its treatment of the topic has been sufficiently theological.

scholarly journals Reexamining the effect of gustatory disgust on moral judgment: A multi-lab direct replication of Eskine, Kacinik, and Prinz (2011)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Ghelfi ◽  
Cody D Christopherson ◽  
Heather L. Urry ◽  
Richie L Lenne ◽  
Nicole Legate ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Bayes Factor ◽  
Mixed Effects ◽  
Original Study ◽  
Taste Perception ◽  
Effect Sizes ◽  
Linear Mixed Effects ◽  
Standardized Effect Sizes ◽  
Meta Analyses ◽  
Moral Wrongness

Eskine, Kacinik, and Prinz’s (2011) influential experiment demonstrated that gustatory disgust triggers a heightened sense of moral wrongness. We report a large-scale multi-site direct replication of this study conducted by participants in the Collaborative Replications and Education Project. Participants in each sample were randomly assigned to one of three beverage conditions: bitter/disgusting, control, or sweet. Then, participants made a series of judgments indicating the moral wrongness of the behavior depicted in each of six vignettes. In the original study (N = 57), drinking the bitter beverage led to higher ratings of moral wrongness than drinking the control and sweet beverages; a beverage contrast was significant among conservative (N = 19) but not liberal (N = 25) participants. In this report, random effects meta-analyses across all participants (N = 1,137 in k = 11 studies), conservative participants (N = 142, k = 5), and liberal participants (N = 635, k = 9) revealed standardized effect sizes that were smaller than reported in the original study. Some were in the opposite of the predicted direction, all had 95% confidence intervals containing zero, and most were smaller than the effect size the original authors could meaningfully detect. In linear mixed-effects regressions, drinking the bitter beverage led to higher ratings of moral wrongness than drinking the control beverage but not the sweet beverage. Bayes Factor tests reveal greater relative support for the null hypothesis. The overall pattern provides little to no support for the theory that physical disgust via taste perception harshens judgments of moral wrongness.

Mill on the Harm in Not Voting

Utilitas ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 126-133 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. G. BROWN
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Fair Share ◽  
The Common ◽  
Staying At Home ◽  
Moral Wrongness ◽  
At Home

Christopher Miles Coope offers a letter, drafted by Helen Taylor but certified by Mill, in which Mill asserts the duty to vote, as evidence that he could not have regarded harmfulness to others as a necessary condition of moral wrongness. But it is clear that Mill regarded the duty to vote as one of imperfect obligation, and the wrongness of not fulfilling it as a matter roughly of not doing enough, in this case not doing one's fair share. He has room for the common-sense harmlessness of staying at home. At the same time he grounds political duties in the harmfulness of neglecting the power of legislation and in the possibility, consistently maintained, that one can harm by inaction. Mill's view, central to his relation between morality and liberty, remains at work here, while also suggesting reflections on the peculiarity of his conception of harm.

Disgust, Moral Disgust, and Morality

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Gert
Keyword(s):  
Moral Norms ◽  
Signaling System ◽  
Signaling Mechanisms ◽  
Direct Light ◽  
Significant Difference ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Moral Disgust ◽  
Core Disgust ◽  
Moral Wrongness

This paper calls into question the idea that moral disgust is usefully regarded as a form of genuine disgust. This hypothesis is questionable even if, as some have argued, the spread of moral norms through a community makes use of signaling mechanisms that are central to core disgust. The signaling system is just one part of disgust, and may well be completely separable from it. Moreover, there is plausibly a significant difference between the cognitive scientist’s concept of an emotion and the everyday notion of that emotion. Finally, even if, as this paper contests, some form of disgust were directly elicited by the moral wrongness of certain kinds of behavior, research on the socio-moral elicitors of the disgust mechanism would still be unlikely to shed much direct light on the nature or content of morality.

Externalism and Self-governance

Utilitas ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN SKORUPSKI
Keyword(s):  
Moral Duty ◽  
Moral Concepts ◽  
Moral Wrongness

What outcomes are good, and what there is reason for one to do, is not generally determined by what one thinks or even what one has reason to think. But is a similarly ‘externalist’ account of the distinctively moral concepts, the concepts of moral duty or obligation, of moral wrongness, blameworthiness and guilt, appropriate? I argue not; and on that basis I suggest that an externalist account is not appropriate for the concept of a virtue either.

scholarly journals Judging accidental harm: Due care and foreseeability of side effects

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesco Margoni ◽  
Luca Surian
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Psychology ◽  
Side Effects ◽  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Negative Outcomes ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
Negative Side ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
Information Agents ◽  
Negative Side Effects ◽  
Moral Wrongness

AbstractBoth in philosophy and in cognitive psychology, models of moral judgment posit that individuals take into account both agents’ intentions and actions’ outcomes. The present research focused on a third crucial piece of information, agents’ negligence. In Study 1, participants judged the moral wrongness and punishability of agents’ actions that resulted in negative side effects. In the scenarios, we orthogonally manipulated whether the agent acted with or without due care and whether she had or did not have information to foresee the negative side effects of her actions. Participants judged careless agents more condemnable than careful agents, especially when negative side effects could have been easily foreseen. In Study 2, we manipulated due care in acting in cases where the agent’s primary intention was to bring about a certain outcome without knowing that such outcome would actually be harmful. Here information about the foreseeability of negative outcomes was not provided, and participants judged actions performed with care more wrong and punishable than actions performed without care. This suggests that sometimes acting carefully and nevertheless causing harm may constitute evidence of the presence of negative intentions in the agents or evidence of the fact that agents indeed could have foreseen the negative effects of their actions. Together, these findings indicate that carefulness in acting and foreseeability are highly intertwined in moral judgment, and highlight the need to improve existing processing models of moral judgment to account for people’s evaluation of agents and actions whenever negligence can be attributed.

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